I. Field
The following description relates generally to wireless communications systems, and more particularly to public warning systems and methods for wireless communication systems.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, data, and so forth. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., bandwidth and transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
An orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) communication system effectively partitions the overall system bandwidth into multiple (NF) subcarriers, which may also be referred to as frequency sub-channels, tones, or frequency bins. For an OFDM system, the data to be transmitted (i.e., the information bits) is first encoded with a particular coding scheme to generate coded bits, and the coded bits are further grouped into multi-bit symbols that are then mapped to modulation symbols. Each modulation symbol corresponds to a point in a signal constellation defined by a particular modulation scheme (e.g., M-PSK or M-QAM) used for data transmission. At each time interval that may be dependent on the bandwidth of each frequency subcarrier, a modulation symbol may be transmitted on each of the NF frequency subcarrier. Thus, OFDM may be used to combat inter-symbol interference (ISI) caused by frequency selective fading, which is characterized by different amounts of attenuation across the system bandwidth.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communication system can concurrently support communication for multiple wireless terminals that communicate with one or more base stations via transmissions on forward and reverse links. The forward link (or downlink) refers to the communication link from the base stations to the terminals, and the reverse link (or uplink) refers to the communication link from the terminals to the base stations. This communication link may be established via a single-in-single-out, multiple-in-signal-out or a multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) system.
A MIMO system employs multiple (NT) transmit antennas and multiple (NR) receive antennas for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the NT transmit and NR receive antennas may be decomposed into NS independent channels, which are also referred to as spatial channels, where NS≦min{NT, NR}. Generally, each of the NS independent channels corresponds to a dimension. The MIMO system can provide improved performance (e.g., higher throughput and/or greater reliability) if the additional dimensionalities created by the multiple transmit and receive antennas are utilized. A MIMO system also supports time division duplex (TDD) and frequency division duplex (FDD) systems. In a TDD system, the forward and reverse link transmissions are on the same frequency region so that the reciprocity principle allows estimation of the forward link channel from the reverse link channel. This enables an access point to extract transmit beam-forming gain on the forward link when multiple antennas are available at the access point.
Such wireless systems can be employed for public service including the ability to broadcast warnings across wireless networks. For instance, there are interests in using cellular systems such as those specified by 3GPP for the purpose of a Public Warning System. However, the requirements from different regions of the world for such a public warning system are conflicting. For example, Japan has plans to utilize the system for Earthquake Warning, which requires a response time of less than five seconds, yet at the same time has limited requirement to the amount of data to be transferred. In other regions, the response time is less stringent but there is requirements transmission of significantly more data (e.g., maps, instructions, description of the event). To satisfy these less time constrained applications of Public Warning Systems, point-to-multipoint transmissions such as Cell Broadcast Service (CBS), Mobile Broadcast Multimedia Service (MBMS) or MobileTV such as MediaFLO could be a usable solution. However these have two main drawbacks: first they are not likely to be able to provide the fast response time required for a Earthquake warning system; secondly it will require that the mobile station is configured for monitoring the relevant point-to-multipoint system and such a permanent monitoring will lead to a significant increase of the mobile stations standby power consumption.